The Hanging Garden

Ten years after he disappeared from his family's life, Sweet William (Chris Leavins) returns home to Nova Scotia for his sister's wedding. Despite the fact that he's gone from a morbidly obese adolescent to a thin, handsome, self-assured young man, the reunion proves bittersweet. Although he ...more

This spare, exquisitely nuanced exorcism of childhood ghosts recasts the traditional dysfunctional-family melodrama as a magical-realist fable where both memory and nightmare take physical form and it's up to the viewer to decide what's really happening. The title refers in part to the backyard garden where Whiskey Mack (Peter MacNeill) drills young Sweet William (Ian Parsons) on the names of flowers and where William later sees disturbing visions of a past that never happened. In another ...more